The Departed: Scorsese gets all Irish on our asses, and it works

I admit it. I thought Marty had lost it. I thought he had gone all lazy and cute and Hollywood, with no fire in the belly. And for the first few rounds, I was right. His punches were soft and pretty, too pretty. But then something happened. He got his rhythm back. The punches stung, and they kept coming! They kept coming fast! And his footwork! He was on top of me all the way, making me fight his fight. I figured by the tenth he had to be tiring, but he wasn’t. He just kept coming. Sure he swung a little too hard in the fifteenth, reaching for the knockout that just wasn’t there, but in the end, it was his fight. He’d played it like a pro all the way.

The Departed did start slow. An Irish mobster quoting James Joyce? A Southie quoting Hawthorne? With 1400 SATs? And a Social Register mom? Too cute! Definitely, too cute!

But then things tighten up. The literary allusions disappear. We’re in a world of ugly, angry Irishmen, with two pretty boys, Matt Damon and Leo DiCaprio, trying to keep their noses above the mire. They’re both cops, sort of. Matt’s a hotshot in Special Investigations, but his real action is snitching for Mephistophelian mob boss Jack Nicholson, hamming it up in his fattest role in years. Big Jack’s got the world by the tail, as long as Leo, working undercover as an awfully sharp-looking goon, doesn’t bring him down.

We get lots of backstory about growing up poor and Irish,[1] and about family, and lots about cops and lots about gangsters, but there’s nothing in this film that explains why Matt is a snitch or why Leo wants to go undercover. Everybody’s Irish, but being Irish just doesn’t mean what it used to.[2] The Sixties happened, and no one’s anything any more.[3] The Irish aren’t poor like they used to be, and the Church, well, it’s been so long since anyone believed a damn thing a priest said that no one can remember when he lost his faith. You can’t miss something you never had, can you?[4]

For better or for worse, Scorsese doesn’t reach for the sort of macho expressionism that marked/marred films like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. The Departed is a straight urban thriller, and it works all the better for the lack of baggage.[5]

There are a few blemishes beyond the Joyce quote. The soundtrack, Marty’s mix tape of classic rock, isn’t quite as cool as he probably thinks it is. There’s a real, though brief, low point, when Jack tells Matt that he should think about going back to school. School! When he’s got all the cash he can spend, all the broads he can fuck, and all the booze he can drink? School? School?[6]

Vera Farmiga’s role as a police shrink is always one step away from being either a cliché or a plot device, or both, but she is awfully cute, and, in her one nude scene, awfully sexy.[7]And in the last ten minutes Scorsese is trying too hard. But otherwise The Departed is a good, hard ride all the way.

Second ThoughtsNicholson was getting most of the press as The Departed opened, probably because movie reviewers, most of whom are, um, old, like to see an old guy who still knows how to party, but I have to say that it’s Leo who walks away with this picture in the end. The truth is as simple as it is ugly: if you’re tall and thin, you’re cool! Like he wasn’t getting enough tail already!

The Departed was lifted pretty directly from an Asian flick, Infernal Affairs (not Internal Affairs, the 1990 Hollywood pic with Richard Gere and Andy Garcia, which wasn’t bad either), which members of the film cognoscenti, which sure don’t include me, say is better. Maybe so, and you can get it through Netflix, along with Infernal Affairs II and Infernal Affairs III.

[1] The script was by William Monahan (probably Irish) and Siu Fai Mak and Felix Chong (probably not).[2] Still, there’s plenty in this picture to make you glad you aren’t Irish. (And if you are Irish, hey, lighten up! You could be Episcopalian!)[3] Mark Wahlberg, as Sgt. Dignam, is fifties Irish, ready to go out and kill commies and bring their heads back for Mother Mary to hang on the wall. But the commies are gone and Mother Mary, well, I hear she sleeps around. No one to kill, and no one to kill for! What’s an altar boy to do? Wahlberg spends a lot time trashing Leo as a fucking lace-curtain Irish homo, but then disappears two-thirds of the way through the film. Plot Spoiler Speculation: In another era, the film would have ended with Dignam saving Leo’s ass, but Scorsese is above such old-fashioned melodrama. In this world, the fix is always on, and the Man, whoever he is, always wins.[4] The only priests in the film are a couple of broken-down fairies who couldn’t molest a kitten. Scorsese isn’t hostile to the Church so much as he’s contemptuous of it. [5] When Scorsese goes for deep, he usually comes up empty. The Departed isn’t heavy, but I’m liking it more than any of his other films.[6] In interviews, Nicholson has described his character as “the incarnation of evil.” I’m guessing he wanted that softened a little.[7] Maybe she used a body double, but who gives a shit? I’m willing to be fooled.

Alan Vanneman is a writer living in Washington, DC. He is the author of two dead-tree novels, Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra and Sherlock Holmes and the Hapsburg Tiara, both published by Penzler Press. Sherlock Holmes and the Hapsburg Tiara is available as an audiobook from Blackstone/Downpour. He is also the author of three new Nero Wolfe novellas recreating Rex Stout’s famous fat detective, a FREE ebook, and Author! Author! Auden, Oates, and Updike, a collection of two short stories and a novella, available both as an ebook and print on demand. All of his fiction can be accessed here at his blog Literature R Us. Portions of his article "Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone," which originally appeared online in Bright Lights, have been included in a textbook anthology by Allison Smith, Trixie Smith, and Stacia Watkins.